Biography
Private Dennis Mora was a Puerto Rican U.S. Army soldier from New York stationed at Fort Hood, Texas in 1966. He was the most politically experienced of the Fort Hood Three (a member of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs and a Communist Party-aligned youth organizer in his civilian life), and read the public refusal statement at the June 30, 1966 New York press conference at which he, James Johnson Jr., and David Samas announced they would not deploy to Vietnam. He was court-martialed at Fort Dix in late September 1966 and sentenced to three years at hard labor. He died on July 14, 2014.
The custody dates, corrected from contemporary sources: all three of the Fort Hood Three were arrested and confined by military authorities in New York on July 7, 1966 — not late September, which was merely when the early-September courts-martial were behind them — and remained confined through trial and imprisonment. The Militant, in a report datelined October 16, 1968, records Mora released that very day, October 16, 1968, and the NYU Daily Worker photographic archive independently confirms his return from imprisonment at LaGuardia Airport on that date — two years, three months, and nine days after his confinement began.
